I need to clone a copy of the drive I currently use in my Dell M90 laptop. I want to duplicate this drives structure & content to a 2nd drive for backup.
Disk Structure current drive (Drive-1):
1. 63MB EISA Hidden [Dell Utils]
2. C_System_M90 (C:), 136.72 GB, (Boot-Primary), NTFS, [OS Win Vista Ultimate]
3. Data-M90 (D:), 161.31 GB, (Primary), NTFS, [DATA]
(Drive-1) - source currently in laptop.
(Drive-2) - target to clone to.
NOTE: Both drives are Western Digital Scorpio Black 320 GB SATA3.
=Drive-2 Target:
I previously used Ghost 14 to restore the OS and Data partitions from (Drive-1) to (Drive-2) using independent recovery points for the OS and Data partitions created using Ghost 14. However, I neglected to include the Dell Utils partition when I originally did the restore to Drive-2. So, (Drive-2) currently has the OS and Data partitions and both have content, but it does not have the Dell Utils partition.
Questions:
1. What would be the best way for me to prepare Drive-2 so I can duplicate the (Drive-1) image to (Drive-2)? I need to end up with the identical structure currently on (Drive-1).
2. Once (Drive-2) is prepared, would it be better to use Copy Drive or Restore to create an identical image of (Drive-1) on (Drive-2)?
Note: I have some external drive cases I can use for 1 or both of the drives. One of the external cases is eSATA / USB and the others are only USB.
Thanks for any help on this.
Tom Abbott